[Tango-L] Aron, I have a question about "nuevo".

[Ecsedy Áron]

--HBBOOGIE1 at aol.com wrote:
 > When  you dance at milongas and the majority of the people are not 
dancing
 > nuevo, do  you stop and change directions and take up a great deal of 
space?

No. This came up on Tango-L in last decade over hundred times over: the
nuevo method enables you to teach the technical part very fast, but you
can't teach adults to learn how to pay attention. Most Europeans and
even more in the US are used to large spaces, used to excessive personal
freedoms, which makes most of them simply unaware that in this situation
they must find a compromise: they have to restrict their own freedom to
enable the fair distribution of resources (space) available. This also
applies to the way they treat leading-following, their partners.

In short: bad dancing is not nuevo. Nuevo is not bad dancing. While
someone dancing nuevo is more likely to be young, ambitous, more keen on
the technical part than the other half, open and therefore more
extroverted, maybe even eccentric, thus they may stand our more than the
tradition loving who tends to be more introverted, rule-abiding, simply:
conservative. There are stupendously bad dancers in much larger numbers
among the traditionals according to my experiences, but you do not need
to be a statistician to see that perception is cheating you: bad nuevo
dancers are like lighthouses, bad traditional dancers are simply ignored
or avoided by the more knowledgeable dancers within the community, or
they happily find each other.

 > If this is  what you do, how do you feel about not following traditional
 > tango etiquette  rules?
 > I'm asking you this question because I would really like an honest  
answer.
 > I'm not against tango nuevo, it's just that I see nuevo dancers have a 
 > rather selfish approach to space and line of dance and they don't 
seem to care 
 > or have respect for others on the dance floor.
 >  
I don't believe in etiquette as such. Most of the codigos are as natural
as tango itself. They are simply based on the very simple fact of a
large number of people trying to cope with the given situation, in a
given environment. They simply had a lot of time to experiment with what
works best. I look at the so called etiquette as a guideline to avoid
problems. If you know the reasons behind the rules, you will know how to
avoid the problems they were devised to solve (and bend the rules
accordingly).

As for the line of dance: as a teacher I usually have my students dance
in a space less than squaremeter (a bit more than a squareyard) per
couple right during the first two classes. It is not easy for them to
improvise, change direction, mark/follow, on music, while in a confined
space, but my experience is that it works, people enjoy it, and also if
you allow beginners to disregard available space while they learn the
basics, it will simply fail to become a part of their routine. It is
infinitely harder to learn it later.

Obviously, these problems are there with the traditionally oriented
dancers as well. So again: it is not nuevo. It is bad dancing. Only
nuevo dancers usually do have the technical capabilities much earlier in
their learning process to cause problems, and therefore they tend to
cause a lot more visible problems for other dancers if the teacher
failed to make them aware them.

I hope I could answer all you questions to your satisfaction.

Best wishes,
Aron

-- 
Ecsedy Áron
***********
Aron ECSEDY

Tel: +36 20 66-36-006

http://www.milonga.hu/
http://www.holgyvalasz.hu/



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